The Guardian, the GCHQ and the hypocrites
Just two years ago there was an almighty uproar in
England over a phone hacking scandal involving Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid. It was revealed that the newspaper had used
a private investigator, as well as its own staff, to hack into people’s phones
and voicemails in order to spy on them for the sake of a juicy story. The
British public was outraged, the British government indignant, and it wasn't
long before heads rolled: several high-ranking editors were arrested and some
even jailed. The newspaper itself was closed down, its reporters dismissed in
disgrace. That was in 2011.
Now it’s 2013 and we learn that the British spy
agency GCHQ is not only listening in on everyone’s
telephonic data, but also scouring our emails, our Web histories and anything
else that comes their way via transatlantic optic fibre cables. This
government-sanctioned surveillance program dwarfs the phone hackings of the News of the World in every conceivable
way. So is the British public up in arms even more this time round? Not really.
Are the politicians outraged? Not at all, they’re the ones who secretly signed
off on this Internet spying program while publicly grandstanding about the
iniquities of the News of the World. Have
any British spies been arrested for hacking into people’s phones and computers?
Have any agencies been closed down, any employees put out on the street? Of
course not, that would smack of... hypocrisy?
The most unnerving element in all of this is the
strange indifference that seems to have settled over the British public. It’s
as if state surveillance of private data has become an accepted part of modern
living; a small price to pay for the Internet Age, some might say. Apart from
the Washington Post and The Guardian, the two newspapers that broke
the Snowden story about the NSA and GCHQ, there is also a handful of European media
outlets that have been trying to sound the 1984 warning bells. Der Spiegel, once just a trustworthy German
news magazine, nowadays more of a trustworthy multimedia industry, has published
a series of articles deploring the apathy that seems to pervade the British and
US public in the face of this mass-invasion of private space by their own governments
(according to the Wall Street Journal,
the NSA surveillance system can filter through 75 percent of its citizens’
Internet data). To give you a taste of the thinking German’s sentiment about
this whole Internet surveillance scandal, I've translated part of an article
from the online edition of Der Spiegel
which appeared on the 20th of August, 2013:
Cameron and
the Secret Service Scandal: In the land of the black helicopter
By Christoph Scheuermann, London
The chicaneries surrounding the NSA-whistle
blowers at The Guardian are proof that the British government has lost all
restraint in its war on terror. Resistance is futile – the newspaper is pretty
much alone.
 |
| Photo: Maxim Hopman |
Great
Britain is not China, the kingdom is no authoritarian surveillance state. On
the other hand, Great Britain is a country where surveillance has become an
everyday occurrence. At tube stations, in hospitals, at street intersections or
in the bus – the cold eye of the security apparatus sees everything that moves.
There are an estimated six million surveillance cameras on the island; one
camera for every eleven Brits. The majority of these cameras were not even
installed by the state, but by private companies and private contractors. One
has to wonder who in the world has the time to view all these images.
The secret services expect submissiveness from
the media
Every now
and then resistance arises on the island. But many people just accept the
spying as the price for freedom. And in contrast to Germany, many journalists will
throw themselves at the feet of the government, pretending to be guardians –
especially when it comes to Great Britain’s global interests or so-called
national security. The Labour-leaning blogger Dan Hodges represents the mindset
of many in the Westminster political establishment when, in the wake of the
arrest of David Miranda, the partner of [The
Guardian columnist] Glenn Greenwald, Hodges asks: “What do we honestly
expect the UK authorities to do? Give him a sly wink and say ‘off you go son,
you have a nice trip’?”
It’s
astonishing how many Britons blindly trust the work of their secret service
without criticism. Some still even imagine the GCHQ, short for Government
Communications Headquarters, as a club of good-natured gentlemen in shabby Tweed
jackets who cracked the Nazi’s ‘Enigma’ encryption machine in World War II. When
it comes to crucial questions of security and defence policy, or national
sovereignty or self-determination, most people instinctively rally around their
government – even when the threat of Edward Snowden to Great Britain’s national
security is so far only an allegation. So far the powers that be in Westminster
have been able to rely on most of their journalists to defer to ‘reasons of
state’ when it comes to matters of intelligence work.
A war of deterrence and intimidation
The spies
expect prompt submissiveness and discretion from the country’s media. And
frequently they get just that. How else to explain the implicitness with which apparently
government officials and GCHQ employees called on the Chief Editor of The Guardian and demanded the surrender
or destruction of hard drives. The most surprising thing about all of this is
the self-assurance of the powers that be – self-assured that not everything
would come to light. According to the newspaper, a secret service agent joked
after the destruction of hard drives in the cellar rooms of the editorial
offices: “Now we can whistle back the black helicopter.”
